


a haon, a dó

by Mythopoeia



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [362]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Adolescence, Brothers, Childhood, Dancing, Fluff, Formenos, Gen, Gold Rush AU, Happy times with a hammer and nails and Maitimo, Irish Dance, Maitimo’s first summer home from New York, Sibling Bonding, Siblings, St. Patrick's Day, yes here’s some Irish specials for the occasion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 13:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30123285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythopoeia/pseuds/Mythopoeia
Summary: “What’s it like?” Celegorm asked.Maitimo stopped with his laces half-done, and looked up with a confused quirk of his brow. His hair tipped into his eyes, and he blinked.“What’s what like?”Living in New York, Celegorm had been thinking, but somehow he didn’t want to ask it aloud, with Maitimo looking at him like that.“Being sixteen,” he said.
Relationships: Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Maedhros | Maitimo & Nerdanel, Nerdanel & Sons of Fëanor
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [362]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	a haon, a dó

“You’re hitting them too hard,” Maitimo said, for the fifth time, reaching out to take the hammer from Celegorm’s hand. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“I am never. Who do you think has been helping Athair in the smithy, since you’ve been away? Caranthir?”

“Curufin, actually,” Maitimo answered with a teasing grin. “He’s been telling me about nothing else ever since I arrived. Says he’s already casting horseshoes, and that Athair didn’t let _me_ cast horseshoes until I was _nine_ , and what do I have to say to that?”

Celegorm had never progressed as far as casting horseshoes. 

“He might be learning to make them but I’m the one as actually does the shoeing,” he retorted, a little miffed. Curufin thought a lot of himself, despite being only a shrimpy eight-year-old brat. “So who of the two of us should know more about putting a nail in a shoe, anyhow?”

“This isn’t a shoe for a horse, silly. It’s for _me._ ”

Maitimo turned the shoe over in his hand and braced it against his knee, using the teeth of the hammer to pull out the crooked nail Celegorm had been belaboring and dropping it carelessly onto the step between them. Then he held out one hand, genteel and grand in the way Grandfather Finwe was when he held out a hand for his cane or his pipe, and Celegorm huffed, but dropped one of the unbent nails into it. 

“There now. Watch here. It isn’t so much about the strike as—a tap, you see? One, two. Then you can hammer it in. And—done. Catch that?”

“Caught it,” Celegorm mumbled, still feeling just a little wronged, but then Maitimo held the shoe out his way again, and offered him the hammer.

“Go on, have a try at it. Just be patient, Celegorm. Wouldn’t do to hit your fingers, and we’ve only so many nails to bend.”

“Athair’ll just make more,” Celegorm said absently, arguing more from habit than for any real purpose, and he resettled the dance shoe on his own knee, picking up a nail with his left hand. At the toe of Maitimo’s dance shoe was a wooden block, of course, which was itself nailed into the sole of the shoe, and in the wooden block was hammered dozens of nails. That was what made the shoe click so sharply on Mother’s clean parlor floor. Only Celegorm had outgrown his own shoes, while Maitimo was away at school, and Maglor had taken his to New York with him, so Celegorm had taken to filching Maitimo’s for practice, and had worn down the toes so the nails and the wood were no longer even. If he were to be honest—and he had been, in his abrupt nervous fright the previous night—he had made a right mess of them, which was a shame considering how well Maitimo always took care of his things.

But Maitimo had not minded, when he had pulled them out from their chest the previous night and seen the damage, and he had not scolded Celegorm when Celegorm had confessed to his sin. 

“We shall have to fix them up tomorrow,” was all Maitimo had said, cheerfully, and as soon as breakfast was washed up he had hopped outside in his bare feet to fetch a hammer and nails from Athair’s smithy, and Celegorm had sat on the kitchen steps with his heels drumming against the earth, the poor shoes cradled in his lap like baby kittens.

He carefully placed the nail now, and lifted the hammer. Cautiously, mindful of how Maitimo’s hands had moved when he drove the nail in himself, he tapped at the nail to sink it into the wood straight and true. Once it could stand on its own, he struck harder at that brave little head, and the nail dropped obediently into the toe block to shine alongside its brethren.

Celegorm stared at it, pleased with himself, then realized he was sticking his tongue out between his teeth. It was the face he tended to make, when he was concentrating, no matter how Athair scolded him over it.

Hastily, he unclenched his teeth.

“Well done,” Maitimo cheered, clapping him on the shoulder. There was something in the way he did it that warmed Celegorm straight through, the way the early summer sun warmed his face and hair. It was the sort of gesture men gave to each other, when they were proud.

Together they hammered a few more nails in, and then Maitimo announced the shoe ready for a trial. He hadn’t any stockings, and it was far too warm and pleasant on the steps to go indoors hunting for any, so he rolled up his trousers and put his bare foot into the mended shoe, wiggling his heel a little to fit it. Celegorm watched anxiously.

“Don’t tell Athair I’ve put my bare toes in it,” Maitimo told Celegorm conspiratorially, busily checking the fit. “This is our secret, Celegorm. Jesus, have you stretched them out, too?”

“I haven’t!” His heart thumped. “My feet aren’t near big as yours. You just need stockings.”

Maitimo hummed—the Saint Patrick’s jig, Celegorm recognized in just a few bars—and did not argue. He stretched out his leg, turning it this way and that, and then bent forward to begin relacing the shoe, the fine silver buckle Athair had made for him shining in his fingers.

Maitimo’s fingers were very quick and sure, as he laced the buckle back on. Celegorm had buckles on his old dance shoes, too, but they were not half as fine as Maitimo’s, for his were actually etched with designs on the knotwork itself: tiny hounds running, and dragons with minuscule needle-teeth bared, and wide-mouthed fishes beneath spreading trees. Mother said it was because he was eldest, and so Athair had had more time to be foolish with the design.

Maitimo slipped his foot into the shoe again and began pulling the laces tight, whistling. His hair was longer now than it had been when he went away, and it fell over his ears as he leaned forward. His voice was older, too. Maglor had changed more while he was in the city, really—he had grown at least three inches, and his voice was much deeper. But there was a change in Maitimo, too. It was just harder to track, and harder to pin down.

“What’s it like?” Celegorm asked.

Maitimo stopped with his laces half-done, and looked up with a confused quirk of his brow. His hair tipped into his eyes, and he blinked.

“What’s what like?”

_Living in New York_ , Celegorm had been thinking, but somehow he didn’t want to ask it aloud, with Maitimo looking at him like that.

“Being sixteen,” he said. 

“I’ve scarcely had enough time to find out,” Maitimo said, his mouth twisting a little to one side as the considered seriously. He had his lip between his teeth, and Athair hated that habit too, but Athair wasn’t here, so Celegorm said nothing.

“Same as fifteen, really,” Maitimo decided at last, with a shrug. “Except sometimes people call you _sir_ in the shops, and in the cafes and things. And I can carry a little of my own money about, more, instead of only putting things on Grandfather’s credit. Why, are you curious about sixteen? You’re scarcely twelve yourself!”

Celegorm wouldn’t be twelve for a few months, yet. He did not say so. Instead, he said: “I thought maybe you felt yourself half a man, now, with your fancy clothes and things. And how tall you’re getting.”

“I cannot help being tall,” Maitimo remarked, and returned to knotting his shoelaces. As he pulled the buckle tight, he added: “In fact, it is a nuisance being so tall and sixteen. I gather notice without meaning to. Everyone always seems to think I have something to say, whenever I enter a room. And I don’t! What should I be doing about that, do you think?”

“Think of something to say,” Celegorm answered, pushing at a little tuft of grass with his toes, “or else look daft.”

“How about a compromise: I shall endeavor to say daft things?”

“As you like,” Celegorm agreed, dryly, and Maitimo chuckled, and tugged the buckle to secure it.

“There!”

Maitimo hopped up on one foot, and stumped unevenly out to the flat earth by the pump. He bent the shoe cautiously this way and that, and ventured a few trebles which tossed up a cloud of dust. Celegorm coughed.

“Oh—apologies, Celegorm.”

“Never mind,” Celegorm said, wiping his face with his shirt collar. “How does it feel?”

“It feels fine, I think—a little off-kilter, but that is likely just because I’ve only the one on. I’ll have to lace up the other too, to know for sure.”

He kicked up more dust. Celegorm jumped up himself, shaking like a dog before jogging to join his brother.

“Nah, I think the problem’s with you, Maitimo. Forgotten how to jig properly, with all your society dances and rot. A proper ballroom dandy.”

“That’s unfair! And an exaggeration,” Maitimo added, deliberately kicking dust Celegorm’s way this time, making him sputter and laugh. “I’ve been to only a few dances, and I’ll warrant that even without my shoes for practice I can jig _you_ under the table any day.”

“Try me,” Celegorm sneered, kicking dust back, and Maitimo yelped, jumping back, before launching into the most outrageously exaggerated Saint Patrick’s jig Celegorm had ever seen, heedless of his mismatched feet. The ornate silver buckle flashed from one foot; his bare ankle, white and slim, flashed from the other. Celegorm watched with narrowed eyes, shirt pulled up over his mouth, until Maitimo stubbed his bare toe and swore, loudly, with a word that would surely have had Mother washing his mouth out with soap if she had heard. 

“Ballroom dandy,” Celegorm crowed, laughing, and Maitimo seized him by the hands and began to swing him round to the rhythm of a phantom reel, quick as any sort of wild creature. Celegorm could have resisted, but he did not; instead he capered with him, round and round, flushed-faced and panting and giddy with the sheer joy of being alive. Being alive, and being outdoors, with Maitimo home again.

“Boys! Who has been leaving tools out on the steps? If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times—“

Mother had been in uncommonly good spirits since Maitimo and Maglor came home; this was the first time Celegorm had heard her raise her voice in a week. He jumped, guilty, and broke from Maitimo, wiping the sweat from his face with his shirtsleeve. Mother was standing not at the kitchen doorway but on the dry brown earth at the foot of the steps, hands on her hips and a look of thunder in her eyes as she surveyed the clutter they had left behind.

For a fleeting instant, Celegorm considered whether he still had time to slink away before being caught. But before he could decide, Maitimo sprang up and ran towards their mother, flinging his arms over her shoulders in a guileless embrace.

“Oh, Mamaí! It was my fault, I dragged Celegorm away to frolic. You mustn’t be cross. Look, I shall tidy them all away now, see?”

He tried to pull away towards the steps, but Mother did not let him. She had put up one hand to cradle his wrists, where they rested against the front of her paint-spattered work smock. Celegorm was not particularly fond of painting, or sculpture, or anything else hunched and small and indoors of that sort. But he did, secretly, love the way Mother’s painting muslins looked when she was near the end of a project: all the little chips and smears of brilliant colors, like a dress covered all over with wildflower petals, or a thumbprint of every sunset and other kind of sky.

Mother had put up one hand, and now she used that hand to hold Maitimo’s own when he was about to step away, and she turned around to embrace him in turn, and to reach up to ruffle his sweaty hair where it was all loose in front, curly and a bit too long. She ruffled Celegorm’s hair like that too, sometimes, but she did not have to reach up nearly so high. She was smiling now, the same soft smile she had worn when Maitimo and Maglor had first stepped down from the Grandfather Finwe’s carriage, looking so very fine and grown up.

“You are just like your father,” she chided without heat, and she tapped Maitimo on the nose the way Celegorm might wag a warning finger at Breena, if she were intent on mischief. “Leaving your things about higgledy-piggledy. You are too used to having your grandfather’s servants about to clean your things now, aren’t you? My fine city lad.”

Maitimo shook his head earnestly, wide-eyed.

“No, Mamaí, of course not! I always mind my own things, really I do. I even pick up after Maglor.”

“Do you, indeed! Well, there’s something that hasn’t changed.”

Maitimo laughed, and extricated himself from Mother’s arms at last, stooping to gather up the nails and the hammer, bundling the tools into the polishing cloth. He headed towards Athair’s smithy, chattering about dinner plans and his notion for taking the twins down to the pond for a swim, and Mother of course went with him, promising that if she found the time for it she would be happy to bake a cornbread, and that he ought to take Curufin with him too, if he was going on an outing. Their animated voices faded slowly in the still summer air. The sun glinted on their two copper heads, and Maitimo was still walking a little unevenly, because he had not taken off the dance shoe.

Celegorm shuffled to the steps, and quietly picked up the shoe that Maitimo had left behind.


End file.
